Racism Remembered
Lahr, Anthea
Racism Remembered Confessions of a White Racist, by Larry L. King. The Viking Press. 172 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Anthea Lahr Writer Larry King just manages not to be smug about his transition...
...The key is education...
...As they roared I thought that after our black decade of imploring, suing, marching, lobbying, singing, rebelling, praying, and dying we had come to this: a Vice Presidential Dixie with the President as his straight man...
...One of the most pervasive forms of oppression inflicted on minority groups is humor...
...In the serious and frivolous places of power—at the end of that decade— America was still virtually lily white...
...They roared...
...It is better to light one candle than curse the darkness...
...The crowd ate it up...
...It also chronicles America's unattractive repertoire of attitudes towards those it considers inferior...
...His reminiscences of his racism do not reek with guilt or self-indulgent remorse but have a straightforward, readable style that lets them speak for themselves...
...The patterns of racism in North and South are different, and it is not for a white person to judge which is the worse...
...In the South, the rules of this hideous game are set, while in the North, the apparent tolerance often turns out to be a come-on...
...But by saying all are guilty one is in effect saying no one is guilty...
...But he has no illusions that his personal success is more than an individual triumph: "And when it [the Gridiron dinner] came to the end, the President and the Vice President of the United States, in an act which they had consciously worked up, put on a Mister Bones routine about the Southern strategy with the biggest boffs coming as the Vice President affected a deep Southern accent...
...King quotes Ramsey Clark: "There is a little racism in all of us...
...What we are just beginning to realize is that discrimination is not a Southern phenomenon, although it takes its most extreme forms in the South...
...This event evoked many emotions for Wilkins, who, as a former Assistant Attorney General and now an executive with the Ford Foundation, had "made it" in whitey's world...
...Xenophobia—which is really what racism is—makes victims of all those who haven't the opportunity, or refuse to use it, to find out about other people...
...This is now a popular notion, particularly among radical black leaders...
...He had just discovered that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves...
...That strategy hits men where they live—in their hopes for themselves and their dreams for their children...
...What, I wondered, would it take for them to understand that men also came in colors other than white...
...King and Wilkins have made their contributions, but will I make mine and will you make yours...
...Larry King can write with sympathy and understanding about his stifling Texas boyhood because he kept moving forward, challenging himself...
...They range from outright brutality through polite de facto segregation to tokenism...
...At twenty-one, King stood outside the Midland County Library and said, "Hell, if they lied to me about that, they've lied to me about everything...
...Larry King shows his generosity by ending with Roger Wilkins' article...
...King could not have reached his state of self-awareness had he stayed in small-town Texas all his life...
...Intolerance of racial jokes is too often dubbed "oversensitivity" or "lack of a sense of humor...
...This son of a night watchman needed the Army and stints as a political aide in Washington and as a Nieman Fellow at Harvard to be able to face himself as a white racist...
...Reviewed by Anthea Lahr Writer Larry King just manages not to be smug about his transition from redneck to liberal...
...There was a real sensitivity about the inappropriateness of poking fun at an ailing President, but none about laughing about policies which crush the aspirations of millions of citizens of this nation...
...His history lessons had been the study of white America...
...He was expressing the disillusionment that is now sweeping a generation...
...Black people don't think it's funny at all...
...Roger Wil-kins wrote in a column published in The Washington Post and The Boston Globe: "White people have a funny sense of humor...
...We can never repair the wrongs committed against black Americans, but surely we must try...
...We find it sinister and frightening...
...Confessions of a White Racist transcends being the personal odyssey of a poor boy born in a small Texas town who becomes a sophisticated journalist...
...Not years at school or diplomas on the wall, but the genuine search for knowledge and curiosity about life...
...And most of the people in that room were reveling in it...
...King has experienced them all—from a white man's point of view—and writes about them with wit and poignance...
...It is surely a measure of progress that many colleges now have black studies programs...
...Some of them found something to laugh about in the Southern strategy...
...His marvelous piece describes an annual dinner of the Gridiron Club...
Vol. 35 • July 1971 • No. 7
